Pitts Company. The entire complex occupying the blocks between Virginia and Carolina Streets on both sides of Fourth Street has been leveled and turned into a school playing field. Perhaps in memory of the Spaulding football which would have absorbed the front-wheel landing shock of the touchdown of the Olmsted Bird if she had been given the chance to fly, the goal post of a football field now marks the spot where the Bird lost her wings. The Olmsted-Buffalo-Pitts 1912 Monocoque Bird with its wings made of thin-gauge chrome-vanadium steel sheet, aluminum sheet, and basswood lamination, and its fuselage molded of monocoque laminated birch and chrome-vanadium steel sheet was one of the first true “airplanes” of scientifically engineered design and structure ever to be manufactured. The plane’s original development was stopped when it was 90% completed due to the bankruptcy of the Buffalo Pitts Company in the summer of 1912. Charles Olmsted then formed the CMO Physical Laboratory and continued to manufacture and sell the ultra-efficient propellers on his own for another seven years. Indeed, flying boats with Olmsted propellers broke the world weight-carrying record twice in 1914, a MacDonnell hydroplane with an Olmsted propeller set the Navy climb record in 1917, and a Le Pere fighter clocked in its fastest flight ever with an Olmsted propeller in 1918. Olmsted propellers also enabled the NC boats to fly with 1500 pounds more weight and they also cut the take-off distance in half. Charles Olmsted was also the first to design a super-transport WIGE (wing-in-ground effect) vehicle in the spring of 1942. Out of this effort ultimately developed Howard Hughes huge flying boat, the Spruce Goose, as notes from the meeting with John Towers demonstrate ((Olmsted 2020: 226-230. Olmsted only flew four times under powered flight in his entire life. See also Curtiss NC-4 Horten H.V, a flying wing design from Germany that essentially used Olmsted-pattern pusher propellers John Cyril Porte References Olmsted, Garrett. Olmsted Pusher. World War I Aero #87, November 1981, pgs. 30-52. Olmsted, Garrett. CLIPPED WINGS: Charles Olmsted's Role in the History of Flight. 2020. Academia.edu. External links https://www.academia.edu/41857334/CLIPPED_WINGS_Charles_Olmsteds_Role_in_the_History_of_Flight Google Patents: 1019078 National Museum of the U.S. Air Force: Olmsted High Efficient Propeller https://www.academia.edu/41857334/CLIPPED_WINGS_Charles_Olmsteds_Role_in_the_History_of_Flight WorldCat Identities: Charles M. Olmsted The Maximum Efficiency Propeller, by Garrett S. Olmsted Ancestry.com: Charles M. Olmsted Ira G. Ross Aeospace Museum: Hall of Fame 2010 20th-century American engineers 1948 deaths 1881 births Harvard